Transportation law a big win for Bob McDonnell

For the first time in more than a year, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell is riding high.

With a successful weekend vote in Richmond to enact sweeping transportation reform, the popular Republican set himself on a path to leave office on an upbeat note – and turn the page on a string of state-level controversies that have clouded the second half of his tenure.

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Though McDonnell’s personal popularity has been consistently strong, Democrats successfully dented his national image last year by branding him “Gov. Ultrasound” – a reference to legislation McDonnell signed mandating ultrasound procedures for women seeking abortions. The measure was championed by conservatives in the state legislature and threatened to shadow McDonnell’s other accomplishments in office.

Now, by pushing through a bipartisan transportation law – the first major compromise in decades – McDonnell has cemented his legacy as the governor who tackled Virginia’s legendarily grisly traffic problem.

McDonnell took a victory lap at the National Governors Association meeting in Washington Sunday morning, and shrugged at criticism from the right that the law represented a tax increase. He defended his landmark law as “a conservative approach” that he hopes will allow his successor to take on Virginia’s other problems now that the state’s transportation “crisis” has been averted.

Without new revenue, Virginia would have been unable to support new transportation projects and earn federal matches after 2017.

The new law, which cleared the state Senate Saturday and now awaits McDonnell’s signature, cuts the state gas tax, implements new levies on wholesale gasoline and diesel sales and hikes the sales tax in order to steer hundreds of millions of dollars to state and local transportation projects – nearly $1 billion a year after the law is fully implemented.

It also relies on passage of bills in Congress that would deliver Virginia millions in now-uncollected Internet tax revenues, but includes fallback bump in the wholesale gas tax should Washington fail to deliver.

McDonnell didn’t get everything he wanted: namely, his ambitious goal to make Virginia the first state to kill its state gas tax. But he was able to create bipartisan support in both chambers of the legislature, even if the bill faced sharp opposition from state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the presumptive Republican nominee to succeed McDonnell.

“It’s a broad, bipartisan compromise to [address] an intractable problem, that will serve Virginians well for a generation,” said McDonnell, who acknowledged that issues such as the ultrasound law had been distracting in the past.

“I think there’s been so much undue, unfair attention put on one or two bills. You all like to write about them because they’re controversial. But I feel like every year, we’ve got a lot of big things done. Heck, last year we had major pension system reform and a higher ed reform,” McDonnell said. “That all got lost in the shuffle.”